On January 10, 2014 I resurrected my sadly neglected LinkedIn profile with a measly 109 connections. As of this writing on January 19, 2014, I’m proud to say that I have a whopping 147 connections.

First and foremost, the main thing that attracted me to LinkedIn was it’s professional interface. Unlike Facebook, to me LinkedIn seems to be where the professional people hang out. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy sharing, commenting and posting on Facebook. It’s just that LinkedIn seemed more business-like. The conversations I did exchange with both my existing and some new connections felt deeper and and more informative than any I’ve had on Facebook.

Plus, after doing some heavy research I discovered why my profile wasn’t being seen in the past. Duh! It was unfinished. LinkedIn likes a complete profile and will put you higher in Google search rankings if you have a completed profile.

Also, another bonus of focusing on LinkedIn is I was able to project a bigger picture of myself and my abilities. On one hand, I’m a web designer, social media consultant and email engagement specialist. Yes I know I could have just used the words “online marketer”, but I decided to split it out for better keyword searchability. In addition to Think.Web.Go., I promote my graphic design & photo services under Digital Photo and Design, LLC. At one point, web design was part of Digital Photo and Design, LLC but both Tea and I thought it would be better served and promoted as it’s own company.

Another trick I picked up was to personalize my connection request. LinkedIn has a “default” email that is sent to someone you want to connect with. It’s plain and lacks flair – something that I’m not. So to keep a personal touch and let my potential connectee know that I wasn’t some crazy stalker or spammer, I personalized my invitations. I kept the message short and sweet but added a dab of my bubbly personality. It worked!

What sucked was that I noticed a lot of my connections were just friends from high school who had jobs and just had a presence on LinkedIn just to say they had a presence on LinkedIn. The majority didn’t have completed profiles and several didn’t even have a picture.

One big surprise was a fellow blogged I admired for a l-o-n-g time had commented on one of the status updates I shared. It turns out that both her and I knew the person that had authored the blog post that was shared. What was even cooler is that my long time blogger friend had no clue that I was writing on a weekly basis for a UK-based blog. She immediately said she was off to read more of my blog posts and then here came all of the email messages from LinkedIn, Google+ and Facebook. She had gone out and shared no less than 5 of my blog posts across her own social media channels. How cool was that! P.S. It was Melanie Kissell. Back in the days of my participation on Prosperity’s Kitchen (the web-based reality show Tea created in January, 2013), Melanie was my very first subscriber on my Digital Photo and Design, LLC blog.

Yes I will continue to work and cultivate my profile and presence on LinkedIn. I feel it’s a great avenue to reach people who know me as a graphic designer at Digital Photo and Design, but to also let them know that I’ve started a web design and social media business to complement and round out my overall service offerings.

I always personalize my connection requests on LinkedIn and I appreciate it when others do too. I also really appreciated how you sent me a message to say thanks for endorsing you – I think you’re the first person who has done that when I’ve endorsed them for a skill on LinkedIn and it was very nice to receive a personalized ‘thank you’ 🙂 It’s something I’ll be remembering to do myself from now on too.

Great job, Colleen. Re: the personalized connection requests — I was just reminded that LinkedIn has changed the way those happen so that now, people can click a button to send you a request and never EVER be given the chance to write a personal note. My personal philosophy had always been to ignore those unpersonalized requests (unless I knew the individual), but we may need to rethink that in the future. Perhaps taking a look at their profile first to see if they would make a good connection?

Definitely let us know how/if your sales improve as a result of this work.